I abuse you, but I can’t help it: Supervisor abuse and deviant employee behavior explained

Rebecca Greenbaum, associate professor of management, Oklahoma State University

Have you ever wondered why your boss is acting like a jerk to you? Are you a high-performing
deviant in a bottom-line focused workplace? You’re automatically subject to more abuse
than your peers, says research.

Oklahoma State University associate professor of management Rebecca Greenbaum’s research,
“I Just Can’t Control Myself: A Self-Regulation Perspective on the Abuse of Deviant
Employees,” takes a different approach to understanding abusive supervision in the
workplace. By considering two perspectives (deviance from subordinates prompting abuse
vs. a social exchange of deviance), Greenbaum finds that any supervisor can become
abusive, and high-performing deviant employees will take more abuse.

“Most abusive supervision literature to date focuses on a desire to retaliate in response
to deviant behaviors. For example, ‘you treated me badly so I’m going to treat you
badly,’ but our research shows that deviant behavior prompts an inability to control
abusive urges,” Greenbaum says. “Just about any supervisor can become abusive because
of a depletion in their sense of self control.”

As for high-performing deviant employees, bottom-line mentality and supervisor expectations
play a big role in the amount of abuse received. It’s a confusing situation for the
supervisor: they expect more from a high performer, but when the employee engages
in deviant behavior, the supervisor loses more self-control, leading to more abuse.

“The supervisors don’t expect these high-performing employees to engage in deviant
behavior, so it wears on the supervisor more,” Greenbaum says. “Pair employee deviance
with a supervisor’s bottom-line mentality, and supervisors get more irritated and
engage in more abusive supervision. They don’t have it in them anymore to keep it
together because the employee’s deviant behaviors detract from bottom-line expectations.”

The “real-world” application? Organizations can do more to help their supervisors
retain self-control resources, which would gear management with the necessary tools
to combat supervisor abuse.

“The goal was to show that anyone can become an abusive type of supervisor,” Greenbaum
says. “Practitioners can offer more training to help their supervisors deal with deviant
employees and lead to a better management style.”

The research samples were collected using experience sampling methodology. Supervisors
and subordinates completed daily surveys across four time periods and took into account
sex, race and age variables. The results supported Greenbaum and colleagues’ hypothesis
that employees that engage in deviance provoke their own abuse through the negative
effects they have on their supervisor’s self-regulatory resources.

“Our research highlights the importance of adopting a self-regulation perspective
to understand abusive supervision as an unintentional, non-deliberate response to
subordinate deviance,” Greenbaum says. “Simply, supervisors engage in abusive behavior
when dealing with deviant behavior because they cannot control themselves.”